The Effective Engineer is a must read for anyone in software development. The author, Edmond Lau, draws on his
experience as a coder at both large software organizations and startups to educate us about the concept of leverage. In
traditional physics, leverage is the ability to multiply the force applied to something using a long enough lever. In
software development, Lau uses this as a metaphor to describe activities that we can focus on to produce a
disproportionate impact.

I’ve finally found a way to horizontally and vertically center a dynamically sized div element using the CSS3 flexbox
layout mode. Still getting the hang of it but I’ll be using these snippets below for an app that I’m working on.

Recently for a university software engineering group project, the need arose to perform Planning Poker to estimate the
workload for each User Story (story points). Wikipedia says that:

Planning Poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate
effort or relative size of user stories in software development. It is a variation of the Wideband Delphi method. It
is most commonly used in Agile software development, in particular in Extreme Programming.

Since my group and I were going to be meeting over Skype, we needed a quick utility to estimate story points while being
remote. Here is what I did.

Sublime Text 2 is by far my favourite text editor and I use it to edit/code practically everything. I was working on
an assignment for my CSC401H1 Natural Language Computing course in it when I realized something. It happened when I
was writing a final discussion text file and I needed to do some calculations.

Like a lot of programmers out there, I started off by learning my first language at a very young age and completely out
of curiosity. My first few projects were personal web development and PHP server-side coding. It was easy to get started
because almost anyone could obtain a free web hosting account. All you had to do was let the hosting company put popup
ads on your site. Ah the days before popup blockers. There was so little friction to learning and enhancing one’s
coding abilities that I quickly developed the skill-sets needed to be successful in the software industry.
It helped me tremendously when I started looking for co-op placements in my first few years of undergrad.